As for our application, we have localized it in French, to take part in a new developer challenge (in French) organized by SFR (Vodaphone) for the upcoming launch of Android in our cheese-loving country.

We are currently developing the web component of our application as well as a simplified Java midlet to work on all sorts of phones, since low-tech phones represent the bulk of the market, and will continue to do so in the foreseeable future.

On a sidenote, I wanted to express my admiration for the guys at XDA Developers who have successfuly managed to make Android run on my beloved HTC Tilt (kaiser/p4450) with working data connection. This is nothing short of amazing.

To conclude, we get many emails asking us when our application will be available for the iPhone. As much as we’d love to port Piggyback to the iPhone, this is not currently possible, technically speaking, since Apple doesn’t allow processes to run in the background of the phone. As long as this technical limitation isn’t lifted, no Piggyback on the iPhone… (added to the FAQ)

Piggyback is still making daily progress: we’ve now ordered and received a new G1 from Google, through their Android Devices for Developers program. We were delighted to see our program running on a “real” phone, although it now means that we have to fix the layouts to be useable in landscape mode.

The payment system is also being implemented, as well as a web interface and many other things.

Well, that was easy…now can we get our hands on real devices in this developing country of ours known as France? That would help. We were a bit disappointed not to see a real phone when we met Mickael Jennings in Paris but we’re not giving up.

In the meantime, we are being contacted by many people, companies, mobile specialists etc. and are considering a direction to follow with Piggyback. This takes time, which we only have in short supply these days.

We have been invited by Google France to attend the Developers Day in Paris on the 18th of September.

We will be able to see a conference on Android and hopefully learn some new tricks. When I say “We” I mean my brother, who’s into coding. Yours truly is more interested in meeting the press, the French Android community, and dead raw fish on a bed of rice at the cocktail…

Come and say hello if you’re around; we love talking about our project, especially to wealthy sponsors willing to make a donation.

Well, that’s it, the cat is officialy out of the bag. We are among the top 20 winners of the first Android Developer Challenge. We are of course very happy to be able to push Piggyback even further.

There are quite a few great applications in this top 20, which everyone will be able to download when the Android Marketplace is open.

Our feeling on the results is that the top 10 applications were not necessarily the most advanced or useful, but rather those that were “ready to ship” and with an appealing and catchy UI. In this respect, we can’t say Google hadn’t warned us. Many great applications didn’t make it in the top 20 so keep an eye for those on the Android Marketplace.

That’s it for now, but we hope you’ll be hearing a lot more from us soon: a video of our application is being prepared, so stay tuned.

The Challenge is now nearing its end and we can say that every little bit of time is precious. Contacts are pouring in and we’ve still got tons of tiny bugs to fix before the deadline.

We still have many functionalities to add to our application, but we’ve decided to polish those that are already included in the release for the Challenge. Besides, the latest SDK is still missing some important features that would be required to finish Piggyback.

We hope we can finally take a few days off on Tuesday, and enjoy what’s left of the summer.

We thought we could spend a bit of this hard-earned cash. This was counting without Google’s mistake. We received the prize amount in Euros instead of Dollars, which makes a huge difference given the current exchange rate. Of course we’ll have to send the money back before they send us the correct amount. Another delay in the lengthy process of getting the money. This grant isn’t going to be as useful as we thought in the end, because it just came too late for round 2.